


Solve for Shep

by cher



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M, Smart John
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-14 15:41:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13593219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cher/pseuds/cher
Summary: Rodney can’t focus.





	Solve for Shep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Casylum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/gifts).



Rodney can’t focus. Elizabeth’s patience is wearing down, and Rodney can’t really blame her, because she’s had to get his attention three times now. He even wants to listen to this part of the meeting; it’s not, actually, a giant waste of his time. He just—can’t focus, because he caught John doing it again. 

He can hear himself catastrophising about his blood sugar on autopilot to cover the distraction, while most of his incomparable brainpower is still stalled out on the way John Sheppard looks when he’s being very, very smart and acting very, very dumb. 

This time it was hardly noticeable. It was Radek and his (wrong, wrong, so wrong) ideas for smoothing out the tiny surges in the shield’s power consumption curve that seem trivial for now, but the Pegasus curse guarantees will eventually, somehow, end in explosions. This time, Rodney happened to be looking right at him, and actually saw John’s eyes narrow and dart around the table, sly, under his lashes. He saw John go back to doodling as Simpson, a beat later, shot down Radek’s utter wrongness. (Rodney’s proud of her.)

And Rodney’s suspected, for a long while, that John gets it, could actually have made some useful contributions to the science team, and is criminally wasted on the military. But John refuses to be pinned down, plays dumb and eels off sideways when Rodney’s tried to point-blank test how far his understanding goes. John presses Rodney's buttons right back until he's off on a rant and only remembers later what the sneaky SOB distracted him from.

Just—sometimes. If Rodney is very careful, and looks away at just the right millisecond while watching carefully out of the corner of his eye, he can catch John doing it. Reaching the right conclusion just a bit later than Rodney himself has, and sometimes if the problem was fluid dynamics or ballistics or something else from John’s everyday experience he gets it _first_. But he doesn’t say so; he’s stupidly invested in his dumb flyboy routine, and Rodney was only sure about it because very early on, before John got suspicious, he'd been able get John to argue with him about math. 

Someone should have told Sheppard that no one, _no one_ gets that deep into the Reimann hypothesis without being a giant closet geek, and also that no one can hide useful geekiness from Rodney. 

And additionally, that he will never be rid of Rodney either, because John’s always held his attention, from the moment he lit up Atlantis’ halls. Stalking John’s brain has only made him more interesting.


End file.
